A Panel Discussion of A Satire of the Three Estates at the Scottish Parliament, Holyrood, with the Culture Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, 4 June 2014
Fiona Hyslop MSP – Culture Secretary and Minister for External Affairs
A Panel Discussion of A Satire of the Three Estates at the Scottish Parliament, Holyrood, with the Culture Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, 4 June 2014
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Lots of important discoveries today so a rather long blog…
Today we worked on the first entrance of Divine Correction. What was interesting was the extent to which Tam Dean Burnâs entry created a whole new atmosphere within the world of the play. Good Counsel, Gerda Stevenson, Chastity, Cara Kelly, and Verity, Alison Peebles, had all tried to reform Rex Humanitus and had failed. Suddenly Divine Correction changed the dynamic. We spent a considerable amount of time on Divine Correctionâs provocative question â What is a King? And his equally radical answer â Nought but an officer. Discussing this line in the context of a performance brought home to me quite how potentially dangerous and subversive the question is since what Lyndsay was doing here is asking a heterogeneous audience of people in Cupar and Edinburgh to reflect on the nature of kingship
It was interesting discussing with the actors and directors the nature of Lyndsayâs politics. It was a reminder at how impoverished, in some ways, modern political discourse is since during the discussion one was constantly tempted to separate moral, economic and social issues. Of course in Lyndsayâs world such a separation would have been meaningless, indeed it would have represented the worst behaviour of, as Lyndsay saw it, the clergy. Ane Satyre is concerned with the idea of a commonweal founded on equity where everyone lives within their bounds. In these terms it embodies a very similar approach to politics as that articulated in the C Text of Piers Ploughman. At one level this is a conservative model of politics since it looks back to a mythical golden age where the classes or estates each knew and respected the boundaries of appropriate behaviour. But it could also form the basis of a radical critique of society and in particular those in power. After all Divine Correctionâs agenda is a restorative one but is it articulated through radical language and there is a constant sense that those who transgress against the social bond, disregard-less of status or position will be punished.
In the afternoon, we looked at the rooting out of Sensualitie from the realm of Scotland and it was really striking to see female figures of virtuous rule on-stage alongside Divine Correction.
There was a discussion of the unusual word âconsociableâ â the term used to describe the relationship that the King is now to have with Verity, Chastity and Good Counsel – and its emphasis on âsocietyâ as a result of having allegories embodied on the stage, figuring the relationship between king and virtue as interpersonal.  The same is true of the moment when Sensualitie gets absorbed into the Church, in our staging through being pulled onto Spiritualityâs knee and pawed by the Abbot.
But the really interesting part was seeing the staging of Rexâs acceptance of Divine Correctionâs Counsel and the departing of Sensualitie form the court. As it is being performed, Rex listens to Divine Correction only as a secondary effect of Sensualitie leaving him, rather than from making a positive choice to do so. The moment really strengthens the version of Rex we are building as a weak and easily-led King. As the actor James Mackenzie said to me, he only listens to Correction because he realises he is âalone and Divine Correction is the only person who seems to be offering him any counselâ rather than through his recognition of Godâs emissaryâs authority.
The final call was with the Pardoner to look at the section where he divorces the Suiter from his wife during the âInterludeâ (what we call the âInterval playâ). The strong rhythm of this section was quickly identified, and the fact that all of the dialogue is divided into six-line stanzas, largely lines of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter. There are clear moments of flying in the piece, and the verse lets it build up to the arse-kissing divorce ritual.  It took quite some time to find the right rhythm and pacing of this section of verse and Greg Thompson noted the paradox of some of the most common characters in the whole play having some of the most technical prosody.
We also had the amazing realization today that we will be opening the play on the same day as the play was performed in 1552 â June 7th!! It must be serendipity.
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28 actors, academics, stage crew and a director gathered in what Gregory Thompson called a ‘underground bunker’ to begin work on A Satire of the Three Estates on the hottest day of the year so far – hopefully a good omen for our outdoor production.
Greg T gave the actors an introduction about the sort of research project they will be working on – saying that the type of knowledge yielded through rehearsal and performance is a different but as important form of knowledge as that gained by scholars through literary research. Tom Betteridge added that itâs just as valid, and should be valued as much as archival and traditional scholarship.
Greg T told the actors “We have one job. We have to make the text sing”, saying that every single word is as important as the next in the creation of David Lindsayâs story. He told the cast that they will be at a technical disadvantage as they will lack lighting and sound, but said that they will have music and what he called, the ‘human spotlight’, the rule by which an actor only looks at the person to whom theyâre speaking to help focus the audience’s attention.
Greg Walker and and Tom explained the importance of performing this play in its entirety from a historical and cultural perspective, and Greg T suggested the research significance of asking the question, ‘what is this play’ and seeing it as a much more sophisticated piece of work than recent productions might suggest when compared to other sixteenth-century drama. But he also claimed that our purpose is to ‘delight and intrigue the audience, and give them a sense of what it might have been like to see this play in the sixteenth century’.
The actress Gerda Stevenson, playing Good Counsel, brought up a recent Sunday Herald article on the commonweal which she had found of interest, and Tom responded that the very concept of the commonweal is a difficult one, meaning common-wealth but also -weal, with the health connotation that this entails. Therefore it is not just geographical or ideological but also about a sense of collectivity, raising questions about authority and its distribution.
We moved on to a read-through, managing to cover Part One (split into a more manageable 2 parts) and what we call the ‘interval play’ (otherwise known as the ‘Interlude’ in morning, and part 2 in the afternoon (split into 3 parts). Despite the text unsurprisingly representing something of a struggle at points in terms of some of its obscure meaning and construction, it was exciting to see life breathed into it by the actors. Part One was especially lively and the comic potential of the Vice triad became obvious. However, it was also evident that this is a difficult and occasionally clunky script which will need a good amount of actorly resource and skill to make it work as a piece of drama. Greg W said that the ‘scale of the task ahead’ was shown by the reading, while Tom thought it was primarily the end that presented a the most difficulty theatrically. Tomorrow we will start closer textual analysis on the play to start making sure every actor knows exactly what they are saying.
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I was absolutely honoured to interview the original Sandy Solace from Tyrone Guthrieâs famous 1948 production of A Satire of The Three Estates the other day. A true moment of oral history that speaks for itself, and does so in a âricht merry voiceâ. Jamie Stuart, what a character.
Jamie Reid-Baxter, the early theatre and Scottish literature expert, discusses his previous experience of working on productions of A Satire of the Three Estates, focusing on his part of Folly, a character who was cut out of the famous Edinburgh University productions. Jamie says that that this was wholly wrong, as he serves as the âmirror image of Diligence in the playâ suggesting that âboth Diligence and Folly are David Lindsayâs alter egosâ.
Jamie speaks about his excitement at a full, unedited version being performed in June, particularly the political urgency of the piece that will be revealed as a result. He also discusses the âfundamentalâ place Lindsay holds in the Scottish canon, in that his work looks both backwards and forwards. As a former translator at the European Parliament, Jamie helpfully discusses the dramatic appeal of the Middle Scots tongue, talking about the âroughness of Scots, the Germanic side of Scots, what you call in France the terrien, the clods of earth, the earthiness of it⦠but also the grandeur of those harsher consonants and pure vowel soundsâ. Reid-Baxter finishes by putting Lindsay in the literary tradition of William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomerie, saying his work can âshed light right across the canonâ, but is also innovative, discussing how Lindsay extends the Scottish tradition of flyting in this play.
The first reading of the Interlude went exceptionally well yesterday, with the audience particularly interested in our staging of the metadrama of James V and Gavin Dunbar, the Bishop of Glasgow whom James ordered to “reform your factions and manners of living” at the end of the 1540 performance. Questions from an excellently informed audience included whether the actors felt the tension of performing to a ‘King’ and the audience/court during the reading. Gregory Thompson explained that this is the real paradox of historical theatre research; we can reconstruct texts, spaces, costumes and sets, but we can never recreate a sixteenth-century audience.
The process of working on the reconstructed version of the 1540 play in performance was incredibly useful. The research team felt they learned more in two days of working with actors on the text than weeks of discussion might reveal, highlighting the importance of practice-based research methods. Below are a few photos from the reading as well as a cast list – we were of course incredibly fortunate to be working with such a distinguished roll call of both established and emerging Scottish actors.
1. SIR WILLIAM EURE.  Alison Peebles
2. KING JAMES V.  James Mackenzie
3. ARCHBISHOP OF GLASGOW.  Billy Riddoch
4. SOLACE. Callum Cuthbertson
5. THE KING.  Finn den Hertog
6. TEMPORALITY.  Peter Kenny
7. SPIRITUALITY.  Tom McGovern
8. BURGESS.   Michael Daviot
9. EXPERIENCE.  Gerry Mulgrew
10. POOR MAN.  Tam Dean Burn
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Tomorrow our reconstruction of the 1540 Interlude will get it’s first airing at Edinburgh University’s Haggis Hunting: 50 Years of New Playwrighting conference taking place at the Traverse theatre:
Rehearsals started today with a stellar cast of Scottish actors including Tam Dean Burn, Gerry Mulgrew and Alison Peebles. Our version is composed of a dramatic arrangement of the historic documents concerning this lost play, excerpts from the 1552/4 play that relate to the description found in William Eure’s letter to Cromwell, as well as new writing which contextualises the various historic figures and events behind the performance. Eure, for instance, explains that he is “Governor of Berwick, but I was Deputy Warden of the East March until James V replaced me with a Scot.” I’m particularly pleased that some compelling historical detail uncovered by Greg Walker has made it into the play when Solace explains to the audience:
Interestingly there was a time, when James was a child, when these three men shared a bedroom. The boy king, James V, and his tutors, his guardians, Lindsay and Dunbar, sleeping together peacefully, and now they’re governing Scotland.
Dunbar is the Archbishop of Glasgow berated by James V following the performance of 1540. It’s one of those strange moments which reveals just how small the Scottish political centre was.
I will be playing the Scribe in the reading – the documenter of the political process; a role with affiliations to the documenting I’m undertaking during the project. In fact, at this very moment, the actors are tackling the script for the second time today…
Come along to the reading if you can! Tickets are £6 or £4 and can be obtained by following the link above or calling the box office on 0131 228 1404.
Before further posts detailing our discussions about the staging of the outdoor version of the Satire in June, here is another essay from Greg Walker about the feasibility of the Interlude that was performed before James V on Epiphany in 1540 being an earlier version of the Lindsay’s play and authored by him.
The relationship between the ‘lost’ interlude played in Linlithgow in 1540 (which is accessible only through the ‘notes’ and description sent to Thomas Cromwell by the English agent William Eure), and the full version of The Thrie Estaitis (which I will refer to here as the Satire), for which we have two surviving texts, has always been a matter for debate among scholars. Lyndsay’s first editor of the modern era, Douglas Hamer, argued in the 1930s that the 1540 Interlude was an earlier version of the Satire (Hamer, Works, II, pp. 1-6), but critics have not always agreed. Angus Calder thought the Interlude ‘had one or two features in common with the Satire’ (‘Introduction’ to Spence, p. vii), John MacQueen that the 1540 interlude ‘was only generally similar to the…[text] which has survived’ (p.135). Perhaps most powerfully, R.J. Lyall, while acknowledging that ‘the affinities between the interlude and The Thrie Estaitis are striking enough for the former to be widely accepted as the original version of the latter’, was nonetheless troubled by the ‘many differences’ he also saw between the two, and so on balance concluded with cautious pessimism about our ability to connect them.
William Eure’s letter and the ‘nootes of the interluyde’ mentioned by Greg can be found in the Documents section of the website incidentally –
William Eure's 1540 letter to Thomas Cromwell and the 'nootes of the interluyde'
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Gregory Thompson, director of the productions this June, talks about his experience of working on the text for the first time and his realisation of the truly political nature of the play, saying that he recognised that this was as much a âparty political broadcastâ as an entertainment.
The challenges of the play, according to Gregory, are its historic distance from us as well as the changing nature of theatre over time â now we see plays almost entirely as entertainment. The other major difference is the playâs staging which is so remote from modern techniques. Moreover, the shadow of Shakespeare looms large over sixteenth-century theatre in general, so zoning in on the peculiarly Scottish, as well as the pre-Shakespearean character of this play, will present a challenge.
Gregory also discusses the Interlude of 1540 â its separateness and its connectedness to the Satire. Many of the entertaining digressions from the hard politics of the Satire are missing, giving the Interlude a sense of a being a âdramatized green paperâ. This could, of course, result from the fact that the only source we have for the Interlude, a letter from William Eure to Thomas Cromwell, necessarily emphasises the aspects of the drama that would have been interesting to the English Kingâs chief minister. Greg Walker has recently written about the differences between the two texts of the Satire and the Interlude and his paper will be uploaded to the website very soon.
For those of you interested in the sorts of discussions that occurred during the rehearsal period with Alison Peebles, Tam Dean Burn, Gerry Mulgrew and Gregory Thompson, today you’ll be able to find a diary in the documents section which reveals our preoccupations during that week in January. Please do have a look and offer suggestions for any of the unanswered questions the readings provoked, the key ones being:
1. What are the differences between the 1540 and 1552/4 pieces, and between the Satire and other drama of the period?
2. What is the role of Diligence?
3. To modernise or not to modernise?
Here, also, is a video of Gerry Mulgrew reading out Folly’s sermon at the very end of the play. As it says at the beginning of the rehearsal diary, this is where we started, because Gregory Thompson found it very strange that such an episode should happen after the seeming climax of the play – the enactment of the laws discussed by the parliament. Yet Folly comes on and undermines this apparently ‘serious’ conclusion by delivering a speech which states ‘Stultorum numerus infinitus’ - the number of fools is infinite. His monologue takes the form of a sermon joyeux, a mock-sermon delivered by someone who is not a preacher. In it, he distributes a number of folly hats to society’s fools and his targets are merchants, old men who marry young girls, the clergy, and kings. The section on kings moves his sermon from the general to the specific as he laments Scotland’s foreign policy and discusses current European conflicts. He ends by invoking the souls of two contemporary court fools, Gilly‑mouband and ‘good Cacaphaty’, continuing to locate his words in the Scottish present. The whole speech destabilises any tidy conclusion to the play by shifting responsibility back to the royal spectators and the audience themselves.
The image at the top of the page, incidentally, is Holbein’s depiction of a fool’s sermon to an audience of fools from Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly.
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